“You should be more proactive and less reactive.” How many times have you been given this feedback? I have many times, and I find it mostly confusing. Hindsight is 20/20 so it’s easy to offer up when looking at the past, but I can’t prepare for every contingency. And I can’t see the future so …
A Thoughtful Rejection of Proactive Versus Reactive Read More »
We’ve all been there. We show up to the sprint review, and a team is showing off technical specs, slides, or perhaps sharing their code. Rarely do they demo the increment they’ve created. And maybe they’re also not inviting anyone outside the team to be part of the conversation. As their coach, we want to …
Revamp Your Sprint Review: 3 Essential Questions for Success Read More »
Let me tell you a secret about a simple mechanism that the U.S. Marine Corps employs to decentralize decision making. The brilliance of it is in its simplicity, and I do believe it’s mostly a secret. Only once in all my years have I run across anyone who has described what I’m about to describe …
How the Marine Corps Decentralizes Decision Making Read More »
Almost everyone agreed that we need to get better at estimation. I heard this recently from a team. It’s not the first time, and I’m sure it won’t be the last. Teams struggle with estimates; others needlessly obsess over it. And while I agree with the sentiment, it’s true but useless. It’s unactionable. In order …
If Estimates Were Accurate, We’d Call Them Actuals Read More »
Who here just started a new job? Or maybe you’re about to start a new job? This is the situation I recently faced. It’s stressful, and it was important to me that I make a strong, lasting, and positive first impression. In fact, let’s talk about that today, but before we do, I’d like to …
Let’s try something different today. I’d like to tell you a story. To do it justice, I won’t write about it. Instead, I’ll share a video where I told this story to an agile group here in Silicon Valley, and it began as I wrestled with several questions: Can data help our teams improve? …
Books like Mike Cohn’s Succeeding with Agile and Henrik Kniberg’s Scrum and XP from the Trenches were two of the first books I read as I began my agile journey. These books were useful to teach me about Scrum, but Scrum is simple to understand. People though? They’re a challenge. As Ronika Lewis eloquently put it: The …
We spend a lot of our days talking about epics, stories, and tasks, and in many cases, we assume others understand these concepts as expertly as we do. Sometimes they don’t, and today I intend to take Leonardo da Vinci’s advice: Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication. Below you’ll find a table that boils epics, stories, and …
I think every agile team should be viewed as a small startup. When you do so, you can begin viewing senior leadership largely as venture capitalists (VC). They’ll occasionally visit your office, they’ll provide valuable expertise and insights that will help your small company succeed, they’ll paint a vision of your competitive landscape so you …
In my previous blog post, I wrote about data-driven experiments. Unfortunately, it lacked any practical application, and today I want to do something about that. But let’s get one thing straight first. This isn’t my favorite topic. Why? It focuses so heavily on data and so little on humans. When we get too wrapped up …
